Case studies: Mitsubishi

Cisilion helps Mitsubishi save £1/4 million

"Having worked with Cisilion in the past, we felt comfortable they had the skills required to complete this complex project within budget and with minimum disruption to our existing inter-office voice services.

We continue to enhance and develop our voice services throughout the EMEA region and we hope to continue our good working relationship with Cisilion."

- Peter Cowler, Mitsubishi Corporation.

The customer

Operating around the world in a wide variety of business sectors Mitsubishi Corporation's business extends into almost every area of international trade.

What may surprise you is that Mitsubishi Corporation doesn’t make cars or electrical goods - these businesses are owned by other, independent companies who share the Mitsubishi name. In Japan, Mitsubishi Corporation is classed as one of the top general trading corporations.

Mitsubishi operate in about 20 sites within EMEA with their European Head Quarters located in London. In 2000 most of their sites were interconnected with private leased lines for inter-office voice communication (in addition to international connections to Japan), with local PSTN breakout for each office.

At this time major offices such as London, Paris and Düsseldorf were looking to migrate off Frame Relay to cheaper leased lines for interoffice connectivity.

 

The challenge

The ongoing costs of Frame Relay proved prohibitively expensive to maintain and so a decision was made to slowly migrate all European offices onto alternative technologies. Early in 2001 Cisilion approached Mitsubishi Corporation with a solution which not only replaced Frame Relay connectivity for some offices, but totally mitigated the need for international private leased lines for voice communication. This utilised a mix of traditional leased line and VPN technologies.

The solution for voice was Cisco VoIP. The fact that Mitsubishi Corporation was investing in new infrastructure meant there was a natural progression towards VoIP between some offices. Since 2001 this resulted in the majority of their offices migrating towards a central VoIP infrastructure for inter-office calls and the eventual adoption of voice over the Internet for some offices.

 

The solution

Mitsubishi Corporation’s offices have a mixed vendor environment of PBX’s, including Bosch, Nortel and Alcatel meaning a common standard protocol would be the simplest solution for integration. Initially only the largest offices were migrated to VoIP in conjunction with the adoption of newly installed leased lines. Typically these larger offices, London, Paris and Düsseldorf had higher staffing levels and high inter-site call patterns.

London, Paris and Düsseldorf office PBX’s were integrated into Cisco routers using E1 PRI voice links and Qsig, a standard protocol for PBX interoperability. The routers then packetised both the signalling and voice for inter-site calls. One of the many benefits of this type of integration was the delivery of caller name identification allowing users at each office to recognise who was calling by name.

As Mitsubishi Corporation moved other sites away from their Frame Relay network onto leased lines, voice services naturally migrated to VoIP for inter-site calls. Remaining offices were integrated using a mixture of analogue E&M, FXO and digital BRI Qsig connections, creating an EMEA VoIP network between most of their EMEA offices. Alongside this deployment their Asian and American branch were deploying their own inter-site VoIP communications infrastructure, to which the EMEA VoIP infrastructure was eventually integrated to.

 

The benefits

The major benefits for Mitsubishi Corporation for this project were as follows:

• Reduced costs for inter-site office calls due to convergence of voice and data onto one communications link (replacement of Frame Relay network included). Estimated savings are somewhere in the order of £250,000.00.
• Reduced costs for maintenance of hardware due to combination of voice and data services into already existing units.
• Increased throughput for inter-site calling, more calls available.
• Improved voice quality for EMEA inter-site calling.
• Added information for inter-site calls such as Caller Line Identifier and Calling Name.